CWmike writes “Ever try to remember who you bumped into at the store a few days back? Well, you’re not alone. And IBM researchers are working on software that just may help you better recollect all the forgotten pieces of your life. This week, the company unveiled Pensieve, software that stores images, sounds, and text on everyday mobile devices, then allows the user extract them later on, to help them recall names, faces, conversations and events. IBM’s project is akin to one that Gordon Bell and other scientists at Microsoft Research have been working on for the past nine years.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

Almost five years ago, we wrote about a project in Burlington, Vermont to bring fiber optics to residents there. The idea was that, rather than a traditional “municipally-owned” network, this would actually be owned by the residents themselves. The article focused on the work of economist Alan McAdams, who (it needs to be admitted) was the guy who not only sent me down the path of better understanding the economics of information over a dozen years ago, but also convinced me to start Techdirt in the first place. McAdams has been pushing for the idea that if the end users actually owned the network itself, you would end up with much greater broadband, in part because you might still end up with a single fiber network, but there would be significant competition of service providers on that network. And, indeed, it appears that’s where the Burlington fiber project has gone. A more recent case study on the project suggests that, with a slow and deliberate pace, thousands of residents in Burlington now have access to the fiber network, and can choose their own ISP, if they want.

Tim Lee has now written about another example as well, where there’s an effort underway in Ottawa (which is only about 170 miles from Burlington), to string up 400 homes with fiber, but where the individual home owners will pay for and own the “last mile” connection to their homes. This is definitely a test on a small scale, but it’s a similar situation to what McAdams has been pushing for all along. Let the customer own the connection itself, and then get to choose the service provider. In the Ottawa case, once again, service providers would no longer have to worry about wiring up your home (the most expensive part), but just need to offer service at various peering points, and each individual could choose who to get service from.

In this manner, you still get real competition, which is sorely lacking in the telco arena, and you get the benefits of higher speed networks. It’s not as crazy as it might sound, either. As Lee points out, the telephone company used to own not just the wiring in your house, but the actual telephone as well. Over the years, that’s been pushed back. Now you own your own phone — and the wiring inside your house. So is it so crazy to think that you should own the wires outside of your house out to the main network as well? There are still plenty of practical issues that need to be resolved — and the initial economics may be a bit daunting for many (the idea of paying, say, $3,000, to own your own fiber drop may freak some people out). But, it’s experiments like these that are a real step in the right direction towards adding real competition, rather than the faux duopoly we all deal with today.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Techdirt

Eukariote writes “An estimated 18 million laptops with NVidia G84 and G86 graphics chips sold in the past one and a half years are experiencing high failure rates. Various laptop models from multiple manufacturers (Apple, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and others) are affected. NVidia blames it on bad chip packaging causing thermal failure. BIOS updates that turn the laptop fan on more frequently or permanently have been released by Dell and HP. The cynical interpretation is that this is likely to only delay the problem until the warranty has expired.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

Back in April, we noted that some NY state politicians were trying to put in place a rather sneaky legal change that effectively would force Amazon to collect sales tax in New York, despite not having a physical presence there. The “trick” was to claim that if you had any affiliates in the state, you had a local presence. Affiliates, of course, can be nothing more than an advertiser. So, based on this change of law, effectively anyone who has an advertiser in NY is considered to have a local presence there and must collect sales tax. Both Amazon.com and Overstock have sued over this law, and Overstock has even gone so far as to cut off all NY affiliates in response (showing how the law probably hurts NYers a lot more than it helps them).

Saul Hansell, over at the NY Times, picked up on an odd fact, however. Just weeks after this passed, a separate bill was introduced to repeal it. Yet, that bill appeared to have no sponsor, but the state Senate actually voted and approved it. After some digging, Hansell got an explanation: saying that the original bill was part of a larger bill that was approved, but many felt that they wanted to address just this specific issue. Of course, it appears that the state senators’ interest is not matched by the corresponding state assembly (who would also need to pass such a bill). Over there, they’d just as soon leave the matter as is, and let the courts (and taxpayers) sort it out.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Techdirt

At the OSCON open source software event in Portland, Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute encouraged the open source software community to resist government surveillance and build technologies that can guarantee security without necessitating a sacrifice of freedom or privacy.

Read More…

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

The controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has been shrouded in more secrecy than seems healthy. As a major negotiating meeting wraps up today in Washington, news also emerged that Canada planned to give industry groups exclusive access to the text of the agreement and the negotiators, but it didn’t bother to ask civil liberties groups or consumers to weigh in.

Read More…

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

prostoalex writes “New York Times magazine explores the history and status quo of Internet trolling. They look at the early days of Usenet trolling, current anonymous forums, and social networking pages as the latest venues for trolls: ‘In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word troll to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a pseudo-naïve tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

Ray Beckerman, as you may already know, is a lawyer in New York who not only has defended numerous people against RIAA lawsuits, but also runs the

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Techdirt

Three papers describe improvements that may mean easier access to fuel, cheaper replacements for platinum, and lower operating temperatures for fuel cells, a potentially clean source of energy.

Read More…

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Michelle Shildkret, 360i on behalf of TIME.com writes “JV Games was all set to release ‘Beer Pong’ for the Nintendo Wii when parents and lawmakers got a whiff, forcibly renaming the game to Pong Toss and filling its pixelated cups with water instead. But the game is still rated ‘T’ for teen, and anybody who encounters it will be able to draw clear conclusions as to its intended purpose (drink and get drunk).” Lesson: Don’t play games that simulate drinking before you play games that simulate driving, or larceny.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

Yes, part of the business model for using free music to your advantage is recognizing how that free music acts as a promotional good for you, but the band BuckCherry seems to have taken that a bit too far. It definitely seemed quite suspicious when the band, signed to a major label, put out a press release about how angry they were that their latest music was leaked online. So, the good folks over at TorrentFreak did a little investigating, and tracked down the fact that whoever leaked the album just so happened to use the same exact IP address as the band’s manager. Oops.

So, let’s try this again. Using free music as a promotional tool can work wonders, but part of that is in publicly embracing the fact that your fans want to share your music. Not creating mock outrage about it.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Techdirt

The IEEE 1394 working group has formally approved FireWire’s next-generation standard. The new version defines transfer speeds of 1.6Gbps and 3.2Gbps, is backwards compatible with FireWire 800 and 400, and uses the same cable standard as FireWire 800. Remember the original Firewire vs. USB 2.0 debates? It’s time for the big Firewire S3200 vs. USB 3.0 discussion.

Read More…

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

phorm writes “Reuters is carrying an article about a recent MIT development which may pave the way for solar-energy to be collected for use in low-input periods. According to Reuters, the discovery of the a new catalyst for separating hydrogen+oxygen from water requires only 10% of the electricity of current methods. This would allow storage-cells to function as a form of battery for other forms of energy-collection, such as solar panels. The new method is also much safer (and likely environmentally friendly) than current methods, which require the use of a dangerously caustic environment, and specialized storage containers.” sanjosanjo points out “coverage of the process at EE Times, which features the MIT group’s press release.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

(0d0 writes “Some researchers at Columbia University’s Computer Vision Labratory have developed software to automatically replace faces in batches of photos. Practical applications include protecting the identities of people in Google’s Street View, coupling it with a digital camera’s burst mode to create a perfect group photo, or protecting the identities of witnesses or law enforcement and military personnel. Other links to coverage include Boing Boing, American Public Media, and New Scientist.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

For as far back as I can remember, there have always been folks who insist that micropayments are the solution to the “free” content question. That is, they believe that the solution to “free” content is to set up a system where content can be accessed for such a low price that it’s “close enough” to free and people don’t mind. However, as Clay Shirky pointed out many years ago, it’s not that easy at all. As soon as you add in some cost, even a small one, it creates mental transaction costs that go beyond the payment itself. Basically, just the fact that you need to think about whether or not it’s worth it, creates a disincentive to consume that content. And, indeed, most micropayment schemes haven’t gone very far. Last year, VC Josh Koppelman named this phenomenon “the penny gap” to explain how the “gap” in getting someone to go from $0 to $0.01 is much bigger than the gap from getting someone to go from $0.01 to $0.02 (in some ways, it’s the same as the difference from going from 0 mph to 1 mph — inertia is a powerful force).

However, Andrew Parker is questioning whether the real problem isn’t an economics issue, but a usability issue. That is, if it were really easy to pay that $0.01, people wouldn’t mind so much. In other words, a big part of that “mental transaction cost” that Shirky talks about is (according to Parker) the effort needed to establish that payment (a login, supplying payment info, etc.). As proof that this may be the case, Parker points to the early distribution numbers for the iPhone App Store which show more $0.99 apps sold than free apps downloaded. His point: since the iPhone makes it so easy to get an app and pay for it, the “penny gap” or the mental transaction costs really aren’t that high.

This is a really good point — and it is a testament to what a good job Apple did with the App Store to make it so seamless to the user. You absolutely can reduce the mental transaction costs, and that shrinks the penny gap significantly. However, I wouldn’t be so quick to jump to the conclusion that micropayment solutions will become that big a deal. First off, these are only the initial results from App Store sales, when you’re dealing with early adopters. I’ll be interested to see if the results remain this way over a longer period of time.

Even more importantly, though, there may be other hidden costs that should deter certain publishers from focusing on micropayments. Mainly, you are driving away the ability of your users to share and promote your content for you. In other words, you’re shutting off one of the best tools to get your app more widely used and recognized. So, even removing the transaction costs from the equation, going to a micropayment solution over a free one doesn’t always make the most sense.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Techdirt

s.bots writes “Straight from the horse’s mouth, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has identified water in a soil sample. Hopefully this exciting news will boost interest in the space program and further exploration of the Martian surface.” Clearly, this has long been suspected, but now Martian water’s been (in the words of William Boynton, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer) “touched and tasted.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

For a little over a year, there have been stories about how the entertainment industry has been pressuring Congress to make universities responsible for stopping copyright infringement on their network. This got a lot of attention late last year when Congress tried to tie such a mandate to a provision granting financial aid to students. In other words, the threat was that if universities didn’t act to stop file sharing, their students wouldn’t be eligible for financial aid. This got plenty of attention, and the bill never passed. The most interesting part of it, though, was that much of the reasoning for the bill was driven by MPAA claims that 44% of all illegal file sharing took place on college campuses.

There was just one problem with that: the number was completely wrong. Earlier this year, the MPAA admitted that it had made a small mistake, and the number was actually something like 15% (and even that could be argued).

You might think that would allow our Congressional representatives to focus their attention on something a bit more important — but with super low approval ratings, the people they actually represent matter a lot less than their biggest campaign donors. So, of course, the bill to turn universities into copyright cops is back once again. It is somewhat toned down, but will still require universities to basically be the mouthpieces of the entertainment industry, repeating their propaganda and ignoring that the problem is the industry’s obsolete business models rather than any legal issue.

However, as you read William Patry’s post on this above, you see that the MPAA is also positioning the legislative history on the law so that next year or so, they’ll be able to come back and insist on mandatory filters at universities. Basically, it looks like the MPAA tried to bite off too big of a chunk when it pushed for this law last year, so this year, it’s taking half a bite, but getting everything ready to get the rest of what it wants next year.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Techdirt

porcupine8 writes “Good news for those that have had a hole in their heart (and Facebook profile) since Hasbro forced Facebook to remove Scrabulous over copyright and trademark issues. The creators of Scrabulous have wasted no time in tweaking the game and have launched a new tile-based game called Wordscraper. In addition to changing the name, they have changed the board look so as not to directly copy the colors, etc of a Scrabble board, and have even made provisions for players to create their own board layout! Interested Scrabulous fans can add the application now. Only time will tell if the changes were extensive enough to keep Hasbro’s lawyers at bay.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

Arguendo writes “It seems that earning $5000 a month for bed rest as a NASA contractor may not be so enjoyable after all. A 38 year-old woman selected for the study is blogging about her experience as test subject for NASA’s study about the long-term effects of microgravity on people. There’s quite a bit of information on her page, including info about the screening process, the food options [.xls link], and the not-so-great days of testing and immobility. It definitely sounds like work.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

Back in June, we noted how sad it was that we were all so happy that Garfield creator Jim Davis

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Techdirt

The House of Commons’ Culture Media and Sport Committee in the UK has issued a report on harmful content online, and has raised a number of issues that it thinks the social media industry could improve upon in order to protect users (namely children) from the “Internet’s dark side.”

Read More…

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

palegray.net writes “Two female Yale law school students have used the courts to ascertain the identities of otherwise anonymous posters to an Internet forum, with the intent of prosecuting them for hateful remarks left on the boards. At a minimum, the posters’ future legal careers are certainly jeopardized by these events. While I’m not certainly not supporting or encouraging hateful speech online, these controversial actions hold potentially far-reaching consequences for Internet privacy policy and free speech.” According to the linked Wired Law article, “The women themselves have gone silent, and their lawyers — two of whom are now themselves being sued — are not talking to the press.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

For a while now, we’ve been covering the lawsuits surrounding “AutoAdmit.” If you haven’t been paying attention, AutoAdmit is a message board system used by law school students, many of whom apparently used it to be what, at best, might be called juvenile jerks. For example, there were certain threads insulting various female law students (in incredibly crude terms), which those students insisted cost them jobs. This point is rather difficult to prove — because there are many reasons why the women might not have been able to get jobs, and any firm that won’t hire someone because of juvenile messages on a message board probably isn’t worth working for (also, a few months back, someone sent us some evidence that one of the women actually had gotten a job at a law firm, despite her complaints of not being able to).

However, since we’re dealing with a bunch of law students and lawyers, it wasn’t long before the lawsuits began flying. First, the women filed lawsuits against the message board, various anonymous posters and an administrator of the message board. Of course, the administrator pointed out (correctly) that he’s clearly protected, and eventually he was dropped from the lawsuit — but not before he lost his job. So, of course, he sued back for the wrongfully targeted lawsuit against him. Quite a mess.

Wired News is running an update on the case, where it reveals that one of the anonymous law students who made the juvenile comments has now been identified to the women filing the lawsuit, meaning that he won’t be anonymous much longer. This is a bit surprising, since we’ve seen a series of lawsuits lately that US courts believe it’s important to protect anonymity, even in cases where the content in question is “unquestionably offensive and demeaning.”

However, what’s more interesting, is the rest of the article from Wired, where it explores the “Pandora’s Box” this case has opened up concerning a bunch of issues involving free speech, anonymity and the limits of both. And, of course, since we have a bunch of lawyers involved, there’s one downright scary suggestion: create a DMCA-like law that allows someone to demand a takedown of content they find defamatory. If you thought false DMCA takedowns were a bit much, can you imagine how many such defamation takedown’s would be sent on a regular basis? As we’ve seen time and time again, many people (falsely) assume that any content they don’t like is defamatory, and already send cease-and-desist letters at the drop of a hat. If you added a notice-and-takedown provision, this would be abused to no end.

But, in the end, as the article notes, it’s unclear what good any of this has done. The lawsuit is wasting a lot of people’s times, and is doing a lot more to harm various reputations than the original thread ever really did. Yes, it was offensive, demeaning, juvenile and idiotic to some extent. But, opting to file a lawsuit almost seems guaranteed to make the situation a lot worse — and, frankly, seems to do a lot more damage to the law students suing, than any random obviously childish thread on an open message board would ever do.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Techdirt

An anonymous reader writes “Ogg Theora support for the HTML5 <video> tag is in the Firefox 3.1 nightlies. Theora is the only video format allowed on Wikimedia Commons, so Wikimedia people are pushing Wikipedia readers to download a nightly and try it out. Break it, crash it, report bugs, get it into good shape and nullify Apple and Nokia’s FUD the best way possible. They may have gotten the words ‘Vorbis’ and ‘Theora’ removed from the HTML5 spec, but the market will tell them when their browsers are sucking.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

The US biomedical research enterprise has some severe structural problems. We take a look at what’s wrong and examine one proposed remedy.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Antiglobalism writes to tell us that an Alameda County Judge has ruled against Sprint Nextel in a class-action lawsuit, awarding customers $18.2 million in restitution for early termination fees. “Though the decision could be appealed, it’s the first in the country to declare the fees illegal in a state and could affect other similar lawsuits, with broad implications for the nation’s fast-growing legions of cell phone users. The judge - who is overseeing several other suits against telecommunications companies that involve similar fees - also told the company to stop trying to collect $54.7 million from other customers who haven’t yet paid the charges they were assessed. The suit said about 2 million Californians were assessed the fee.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

In a newly-unearthed court filing, Google responded to a couple suing over Street View by saying that no one has total privacy, except possibly hermits. Everyone else should get used to life’s little intrusions; if they don’t like them, they can always opt-out.

Read More…

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Various safe harbors for service providers that protect them from the actions of their users make a lot of common sense. It’s simply wrong to blame a service provider for the actions of its users. We don’t blame the telephone company when someone commits a crime using the phone. And we don’t blame the car company for providing the getaway car. Nor do we ask those companies to do anything to block those actions. That’s because we all realize how silly that is — to blame a tool provider for the actions of its users. Yet, for some reason, when we move online, that concept gets confused. While most of the focus has been on safe harbors concerning copyright or defamation, when you toss in a bit of “but think of the children!” it gets even more ridiculous.

We’ve already seen this with US politicians bullying ISPs into blocking “objectionable” content, even though they have no legal basis for this (and, in fact, such blocking will only make it more difficult to track down those actually responsible). And, now we see it in the UK. UK MPs are claiming that Google needs to vet all of the content uploaded to YouTube “to protect children from harmful content.” Seriously.

I guess it’s only in the techie community that we recognize that the phrase “to protect the children” is almost always followed by a plan that does the opposite.

The politicians seem concerned that occasionally, questionable content is found on YouTube, and it might take them (gasp!) 24 hours to take it down. Apparently it has not occurred to those behind this demand that perhaps they should be focused on using the content being uploaded to track down those actually responsible for the objectionable (illegal?) content, rather than demanding that Google proactively hide the evidence. Next up, we’ll be expecting the report where politicians demand that telephone companies “proactively” review all telephone calls to make sure there is no objectionable content “to protect children.”

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Techdirt

CorinneI writes “In a way inconceivable in today’s marketplace, Usenet was where people once went to talk — in days before the profit-centric Internet we have today. The series of bulletin boards called ‘newsgroups’ shared by thousands of computers, which traded new messages several times a day, is now a thing of the past.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

Google has put money into a variety of startups through its Google.org foundation, and its apparently liked the results so much that it’s setting up a corporate investment arm.

Read More…

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

eldavojohn writes “Red Hat’s CEO prophetically saith ‘The clouds will all run Linux’ in a brief interview before the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. Here’s the skinny: Red Hat management tools take a back seat to grid computing goals, high switching costs are the trick to surviving slow periods, Microsoft’s interoperability tools are vaporware, they’re striving to catch up to VMWare, Ubuntu is not the competition, JBoss is growing twice as fast as RHEL and Amazon pays the fee while Google wears its own Red Hat for free.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

Scrabulous, a popular Facebook Scrabble knockoff, may have gone down, but it isn’t out. Redesigned as “Wordscraper,” Scrabulous’ creators hope its revised creation falls outside the limits of Hasbro’s copyright.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

An anonymous reader writes “Citizens of the world are striking back at 24/7 state surveillance by pulling out their cameraphones and filming inept officials, deadly healthcare lapses and thuggish cops. So-called Sous-veillance is seeing more and more people posting damning footage of official misdemenours to sites such as YouTube to shame them into action.” I wonder what happens if you inform a cop that you are recording him when he pulls you over.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

It’s no secret that most people hate rebate programs. They’re a pain to deal with, so many people don’t even send in the rebate forms — and then, the various companies that receive them often go out of their way to find reasons to reject them. However, a tech company in San Jose named Vastech went a bit further than that. Rather than coming up with ways to void the rebates, it was caught having thrown over a thousand unopened rebate claims into the garbage. The company has now paid up on all the rebates that it had junked and has agreed to pay a $10,000 fine on top of that. To be honest, that seems rather low for deceiving the public.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Techdirt

Yahoo announced last week that it would be shutting down its DRM authentication servers in September, leaving Yahoo Music customers out in the cold. Now, the company says it will offer coupons to customers who want to repurchase their music from Rhapsody’s DRM-free store, or refunds to those who just want their darn money back.

Read More…

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Postglobalism writes “A massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch is inching along with $12 million in government funding and donations of network capacity by two major research organizations. Many researchers want to rethink the Internet’s underlying architecture, saying a ‘clean-slate’ approach is the only way to truly address security and other challenges that have cropped up since the Internet’s birth in 1969.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

malign noted that AT&T has stated that using P2P on their 3G wireless network is grounds for disconnection. The lobbyist told congress “Use of a P2P file sharing application would constitute a material breach of contract for which the user’s service could be terminated”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

Anyone want to take a guess on when we’ll see the first laws proposed to ban the practice of walking-while-texting? We’ve already seen a

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Techdirt

I know a few details of Apple’s software roadmap that I’ve been sitting on for a while, details that suggest to me that, contrary to recent reports, Apple will not bail on Intel chipsets for those of a competitor.

Read More…

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

MattSparkes writes “Cuil may only have launched this week, but it seems that they’re already enjoying late-90s boom-style comforts. “Lunch is ordered in every single day. Huge fridges burst with snacks and drinks. Bowls of strawberries and muffins lie around the rest area. The company pays for a personal trainer and gym membership for everyone. A doctor calls round each Friday, after the weekly barbeque, to see if everyone’s in good health. Employees drift in an out at times that suit themselves.” Seems like an awesome place to work, but how long will their $25 million VC funding last at this rate?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

The National Science Foundation is developing a research platform for the development of improved networking technologies, and this weekend has seen the announcement of more grants and some bandwidth dedicated to the effort. Don’t hold your breath for an Internet replacement, though.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Riding with Robots writes “Scientists have been using the robotic spacecraft Cassini to explore what looked to be large lakes of hydrocarbons on the surface of Saturn’s planet-sized moon Titan. But they couldn’t be entirely sure that the features were actually liquid lakes, and not simply very smooth, solid material. Now, new findings seem to confirm that the observations really do show extensive seas of liquid ethane and other hydrocarbons. In fact, Titan seems to have an entire ‘water’ cycle of ethane evaporation, rain and rivers.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

Labmeeting is a new social networking site for academic researchers. Is it well adapted for its niche, or unsuited to its environment?

Read More…

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

schliz writes “In a submission to court, Google is arguing that in the modern world there can be no expectation of privacy. Google is being sued by a Pennsylvania couple after their home appeared on Google’s Street View pages. The couple’s house is on a private road clearly marked as private property.” Here is our previous story about Google Street View privacy issues.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

The next beta of Internet Explorer 8 is due in August. Improved standards conformance is the headline feature, but there’s more to a browser than how well it displays web pages. This week news has been released of some of the new reliability and performance improvements that beta 2 will contain.

Read More…

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

Well, you kind of had to see this one coming. Days after taking Scrabulous down in response to the lawsuit from Hasbro, the brothers behind the game have put up a new game called “WordScraper” that is similar, but has a few different rules as well. The idea, obviously is to be different enough to get around the lawsuit from Hasbro.

When you look this over, you begin to realize just how badly Hasbro screwed up in handling this situation. In focusing on a legal solution, it may have created the worst case scenario for the business side of the company.

When we talk about various trademark and copyright disputes, one response we often get is that a company has to react that way to “protect” its “property.” This is not quite accurate. While there are some issues concerning trademark and preventing a trademark from going generic, there are almost always better business responses than suing — and on copyright issues, there’s no requirement to protect. However, in an age where lawyers all too often make business decisions based on what can be done legally, rather than what makes the most business sense, those options are all too rarely considered. In the past, there was often little that could be done for those impacted by such decisions. These days, however, things are quite different. Pissing off a large group of people, even if you have the legal right to do so, can often be a disastrous business move.

This is clearly demonstrated by Hasbro. The saga began earlier this year when Hasbro realized that Scrabulous was ridiculously popular on Facebook. Scrabulous was developed by two brothers who liked the game Scrabble and noticed that it couldn’t be played online. Hasbro had done little to help put the game online, and the brothers were merely doing a much better job responding to the market need than the company that supposedly “owned” the rights.

Hasbro finally put together its own version (which got terrible reviews) and then sued Scrabulous, getting the brothers to take the game down. And, historically, that’s where all this would end. Hasbro was legally in the right and had every right to push to block Scrabulous. But, as a business decision (as counterintuitive as it may seem), this reaction may be quite bad for business.

First, witness the rather loud and nearly immediate response from many Scrabulous fans, slamming Hasbro for its actions and pushing a boycott on all Hasbro products. Some will surely claim that many of these folks would probably never buy a Hasbro product in the first place and so this is a lot of noise about nothing. However, don’t underestimate the reputational hit that Hasbro will take for this — especially among younger folks who may be Hasbro’s most important target audience. As Metallica is still in the process of learning, your reputation is extremely important, and damaging it by treating your fans incorrectly can do an awful lot more damage to your brand than you might expect.

Now, add in the fact that the Scrabulous guys have come back with Wordscraper, and chances are people are going to flock to it, just as vehemently as they now want to avoid Hasbro’s Scrabble. That’s about the worst case scenario for Hasbro, and it was entirely avoidable if they had simply realized how people would react to their decisions (which wasn’t hard to guess from earlier responses prior to the lawsuit).

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Techdirt

New York’s finest tell the FCC to dump the D Block and let cities build a regional safety broadband network.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

An anonymous reader writes “Not only is the US readying its first 100% military spaceplane for a November launch, but it’s going to push NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission til 2009: ‘The USAF and Boeing will launch the X-38B — the first military orbital space plane if you discount the secret military shuttle — on top of an Atlas V rocket in November. They want to test its flying features in space and during atmospheric reentry. And probably its anti-matter rays and nuclear bays and hyperspace engines too (but of course, they are never going to tell you that). However, there seems to be a conflict with the civilian space program which may push one of the Moon exploration missions to 2009.’ Screw the moon. We have to defend ourselves against all those alien extremists from Mars!”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

When Time Warner first announced plans to test out bandwidth caps, there was some talk that it might set the caps exceptionally low, such as 5GB/month for downloads. While Time Warner did eventually put in place a series of tiers, it admits that the 5GB tier is the “lite” tier for very basic usage. Don’t tell that to the folks at Frontier. Reader Shea writes in to point out (via RochesterHDTV) that Frontier is now saying that 5GB of combined upload and download bandwidth is all you can use per month. If you go above that, Frontier reserves the right to “suspend, terminate or apply additional charges” for going over this “reasonable” usage.

See how this works? At first, we’re told that such tiers will only touch on those super high bandwidth users. Then we see tiers put in place where it’s admitted that the 5GB limit is for “lite” users. And now, according to Frontier, it’s “reasonable” usage, and it can kick you off — or add unspecified fees — for going over. Welcome to the world where doing anything cool or useful online is discouraged. ISPs are working hard to make their broadband offerings less and less useful by the day.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Techdirt

Bridger writes “Amazon has introduced two new payment systems for merchants and consumers which brings it into a market dominated by PayPal. Google introduced a similar system for merchants and consumers in 2006, also called Checkout, but it has not found favor with online retailers. Auction giant eBay, which owns PayPal, has prevented consumers from using the Google system.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot